November, 2019

They say you know a politician is lying when you can see his/her lips moving.  That’s an excessive statement: like all professions, there are truthful  politicians and there are lying ones, there are truthful parties and there are, um, confusing  parties. The party  that leaves me scratching my head with one hand and bunching my […]

Part 2   The burning of effigies of Guy Fawkes on 5th of November did not arise from the spontaneous delight of the English masses at the failure of the Gunpowder Plot. It was done in obedience to a Parliamentary Decree which was still in force until 1868 in the life of my paternal grandfather. […]

I wish Tom Watson every good thing in his future career, now that he’s decided to leave his work as a Labour MP.  I also wish he had made that decision about six years ago. He was elected Deputy Leader of the Labour Party at the same time that Jeremy Corbyn was elected Leader. The […]

They say you should never speak ill of the dead, an injunction few of us observe, since it would mean no historical judgement on characters such as Pol Pot,  Vlad the Impaler or Maggie Thatcher. What the injunction implies is that we should not speak ill of the recently dead. Judging by the many tributes […]

  And they’re off.  It may be the respectable thing to say you can’t bear another election but I love ‘em. First we have the circling of unionist wagons. Steve Aitken’s bold assertion that there’d be a UUP candidate standing in all eighteen constituencies probably seemed a good idea at the time – the UUP […]

Dr Ruth Dudley-Edwards, described in a threatening letter by a solicitor hired for its composition, as “a Distinguished Historian”  boasts authorship of  a book on  Orangemen called “The Faithful Tribe.”  I haven’t read it so  I can’t fault it..  But I have read a lot of her work over many decades which might identify her […]

At last it’s happened. I don’t often say the words “Read today’s Irish Times” but today I do. Because n it you’ll find an account of a letter signed by more than 1,000 people – with, significantly, two-thirds from the south of Ireland – addressed to An Taoiseach Leo Varadkar. The group who’ve signed the […]

Did British Intelligence invent Saddam Hussein’s hoard of Weapons of Mass Destruction threatening imminent  annihilation of theUnited Kingdom? Or did they actually believe in their existence? Or the Zinoviev letter of 1924? Or that Harold Wilson and Michael Foot were Soviet Agents? Do they believe that Jeremy Corbyn is anti-Semitic? THE TIMES still apparently believes […]

The SUNDAY INDEPENDENT refused to publish a letter from Tom Cooper, on Eoghan Harris’s endorsement of the view that the IRA were engaged in ‘ethnic cleansing’. A copy is published below. Readers can make up their own mind about about whether it is a suitable candidate for censorship. There is one change: the section mentioning […]

Are the DUP right when they say that a border in the  Irish Sea is a serious threat to the union of Great Britain and Northern Ireland? They believe passionately that it is, and that an Irish Sea border will mean they are grouped more and more with the rest of Ireland rather than the […]